Where Does the Laptop Send It?

About this interactive

The laptop in this activity, like the lesson's demo machine: - It sits on the **office LAN**. Anything on that network it reaches directly, with no gateway. The default gateway itself is on the office LAN. - Its routing table holds one specific gateway, the **lab gateway**, for the lab network. - Its **default gateway** is the office router. It is chosen when the destination is not local and no other gateway matches. A router does the same: if no better route matches, it sends the traffic to its **gateway of last resort**, which in turn uses its own, up to the internet service provider.

What you'll learn

Decide where a host sends traffic: straight to the destination when it is on the local network, to a specific gateway when one is set for the destination's network, and otherwise to the default gateway
Apply the same rule to a router, whose gateway of last resort takes traffic it has no better route for

Aligned to

CompTIA Network+

2.1 Explain characteristics of routing technologies.

Cisco CCNA

3.2 Determine how a router makes a forwarding decision by default

Cisco CCST Networking

4.4 Explain basic routing concepts

Key terms

Default Gateway: The router that a device uses to send traffic to destinations outside its local network.
Gateway of Last Resort: The route configured on a Cisco router that it uses to forward packets when no more specific matching route exists in the routing table.
Gateway: A network node that connects two networks using different protocols, translating between them.
Routing Table: A database stored in a router that lists known network destinations, the metric (cost) to reach them, and the next-hop address or outgoing interface to forward packets toward those destinations. Routers consult this table for every packet they forward.

Topics

Default Gateway Gateway Of Last Resort Routing Table Interactive Categorize

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